"It's sort of hard to know what their ultimate strategy and goal is," Okin says. "It seems to contradict their business model to give away a database when they sell a database."

Abarbanel says the worst case scenario would be if Oracle stops accepting patches from the community, but that such an event is unlikely. No one expects Oracle to put more money into MySQL than its existing, proprietary database, but Abarbanel is hoping Oracle will encourage developers' and partners' attempts to contribute to the code base.

"They have to embrace the standard open source mantra," he says.